How would have been the computer world if Amiga and Atari would have survived?

[Psy]

spirantho wrote:
If CBM and Atari had won.... in other words, without the ultra-fierce competition between technology developers, because they're both closed companies....

Our computers would have about 200MHz processors, about as powerful as a Celeron 300, using about 128MB RAM and about 4 Gig hard disks. Permedia-2 equivalent power for graphics cards.

The internet would be at about HTML 3 standard, no dynamic HTML, no streaming video in good quality. Broadband would be about 512KBps.

However, the operating systems would still run faster than they do today.... and computing might still be fun.

I doubt that that since Atari and CMB would still be competing with game consoles, Sega released a computer based on their console back in 1983 during the boom of Z-80 based home computers and there would be no reason why Sega wouldn't have done it again if the specs of home computers were close to the specs of its home consoles.

I think we'd have seen Atari, Amiga and Mac share the some basic architecture,  they might differ with graphic and audio chipset but odds are they would have been pushed onto cards to make them far more upgradeable with low end models having these chips integrated.

[Psy]

persia wrote:
I think what doomed the Amiga was the mounting of the Graphics chips on the motherboard and trying to develop them in house.  They didn't have the R&D to continue the OS, what gave them the idea that they could do the graphics as well?

I think the problem was penetration, Sega used it own chip sets till 1998.  If the Amiga sold in the tens of millions then Commodore could have easily paid for developing it own chip sets at least till 1998 when it become highely cost prohibitive to do so.

[Psy]

Daedalus wrote:
Yep, it seemed right back then, it could do some nice graphics and sound out of the box, with no messing around with addresses, jumpers and such for your expensive Soundblaster card. If they had kept going, they of course wouldn't be stuck with the AGA chipset, would probably have followed the Apple route as at the time, PPC was the logical progression. PCs at the time were still very expensive for "multimedia" and gaming, and given another generation there's no reason why big-box Amigas couldn't have had PCI, and therefore not taken advantage of all the new 3D graphics cards on the market.

And they might have bought out BeOS and turned it into the Amiga's OS X which actually would have been pretty cool.